NASIG 2014

The Web is changing. Search engines are placing more emphasis on identified entities and the relationships between them - so called Semantic Search. Google, Bing, Yahoo! and others are at different stages in the implementation of Knowledge Graph functionality. Wikidata is applying structured data techniques to organizing the world's information.

Against that background, the library community can capitalize on these developments to ensure that our resources are visible in the emerging Web of Data, significantly enhancing their discoverability. To achieve this there needs to be fundamental changes in the way libraries, and their systems, share information about what they hold and what they license. No longer can we expect library data to be treated as a special case. No longer can we expect our users to find our library discovery interface as a prerequisite to discovering our library's resources. If we want our resources to appear in the daily search workflow of our users, we need to be represented in the tools they use for everything else.

Using linked data principles to share information from individual libraries, using general-purpose vocabularies such as Schema.org, will mean that the search engines will be aware of what we have to offer and where to guide users to access it. By giving the Web what it wants in the way that it wants it, libraries will be able to use the Web to inform their users, relieving them of the need to use a library specific interface to discover library resources.

Richard will explore early examples of these techniques and what libraries and system suppliers will need to consider to take advantage of these trends in the future.

He will then lead an open discussion on the many concerns, issues, challenges, opportunities and benefits that naturally emerge from proposing fundamental changes such as these.